"But there are sentiments in his writings which always anger me, big words which make me furious, and a premeditated fine writing against which I can't help rebelling. My antipathy don't go any further than this."
The other is written to Lytton himself, calling his attention
to a paragraph in his Preface to the 1856 edition
of his (Thackeray's) Works; it is this that really contains
the apology:
"There are two performances especially (among the critical
and biographical works of the erudite Mr. Yellowplush) which
I am very sorry to see reproduced, and I ask pardon of the
author of The Caxtons for a lampoon which I know he himself
has forgiven, and which I wish I could recall. * * * I
wonder at the recklessness of the young man who could fancy
such satire was harmless jocularity, and never calculate that
it might give pain."
This fine utterance, coming at just the right time and
from the right person,—the last of the personal satirists, reformed
into the author of Vanity Fair,—might be used as
an appropriate epitaph for individual satire. Since the
time when Lamb observed that "Satire does not look
pretty upon a tombstone," we have not only agreed with
him, but gone enough further to admit that it is no more
winsome applied to the living than to the dead. And if
we still for the most part reserve our eulogy until it can
serve as elegy, we are willing to let the dead past of spiteful,
recriminating satire bury its dead.
It would not, as a matter of fact, be quite fair to the past to ignore its own repudiation of this brackish current that has discolored the main satiric stream. For it was undoubtedly this element that Cervantes had in mind when he declared,—[1]
- ↑ Journey to Parnassus, Chapter IV. Gibson's translation.
